Abstract
What about the relationship between safety and quality of life? How is it recognisable, how is it perceived and how theorisable and measurable is this relationship? How fear affects individual and social well-being? The Italian Citizens Safety Survey, carried out the last time in 2008 and 2009, allows all these questions to be answered since both subjective and objective aspects of criminality as well as their impact on quality of life are addressed.
The international debate on the role of fear, victimisation and social and environmental decay on well-being and on the several ways to measure fear is very complex and shows the need for a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach to the “safety perception” phenomenon. Also, data analysis confirms that a unidirectional link between individual victimisation and fear of criminality does not exist: perception of insecurity is also caused by generic anxiety related to individual and social variables, such as age, gender, economic conditions, cultural resources and social networks.
But how do we operationalise concepts like “safety” or “insecurity” and their “perception”? In this perspective, it is important to jointly analyse subjective and objective dimensions, as the perceived or real fear of becoming a victim, the safety perception in public and private spaces and the worry of crimes (Butler G, Mathews A, Adv Behav Res Ther 25:273–280, 1983; Adv Behav Res Ther II(5), 1987). The performed analyses (correspondence analysis, clustering and logistic) raised an interesting and complex framework: from one side, the highlighted panorama is very objective, where fear and worry of crime are strongly related to the suffered victimisation, the social and environmental decay and the foreseen risk of becoming a victim; from the other side, in the absence of concrete risk situations, fear seems to be related to the weakness of social communication and contacts and to the socio-economic and individual vulnerability.
Considering the complexity of this scenario, which includes both subjective and objective components strongly related to quality of life, the definition of synthetic indicators, aimed at studying the impact of safety on quality of life, is needed even though it is not easy to be performed. Further work is required.
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Notes
- 1.
Interesting in this sense the analysis of S. Roché who, thoroughly analysing in a diachronic perspective the relationship between the presumed growth of crime and the spreading of insecurity, identifies in the periods of the end of century – more specifically end of the nineteenth and twentieth century – some attention points of the positive criminal schools (Italian and foreign) on the themes of social preservation from crime and social safety in a general sense, more tied to the movements of decomposition and recomposition of the social identity and balances than to the true increase in criminal rates.
- 2.
Refer to paragraph 3 for identification and presentation of the objective and subjective indicators of fear and worry.
- 3.
The authors give the example of airplane accidents, which are in effect perceived and feared as being more frequent than they truly are, in virtue of the catastrophic and uncontrollable effect that they generate when they occur. As a result, conclude the authors, we introject their impact on our lives deeper than what should be attributed to them.
- 4.
The analysis was carried out by SAS software (Statistical Analysis System) and SPAD (Système Portable pour Analyse des Données) statistical software. In particular, the performed multiple correspondence analysis allowed the experience elements and the expressive elements to be linearly combined by extracting the factorial axes on which the individuals have been subsequently classified. For this purpose, the mixed, not hierarchic, classification technique was used (SEMIS), which allows us to identify clusters of individuals, namely, social “ideal types” of acting in presence of fear of crime and the sense of personal insecurity.
- 5.
The authors applied the “optimist” formula of Benzecrì which is used to re-evaluate the percentage of inertia explained by the first and most important identified factors.
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Federici, A., Muratore, M.G., Squillante, D. (2012). The Quality of Life Measured Through the Subjective Indicators of Safety: Fear, Worry About Crime and the Risk of Criminality . In: Maggino, F., Nuvolati, G. (eds) Quality of life in Italy. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3898-0_8
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